TV Leaders Share Thoughts During Summer 2016 TCA Tour

As the fall season of television approaches, executives and
contributors are embarking on the Television Critics Association (TCA) summer press
tour to promote new shows and discuss the state of the industry, providing
remarks on broadcast and OTT.

However at the same time, Greenblatt emphasized an expansion of NBC’s streaming
plans, and suggested that it was dabbling with a few concepts.

"We’re in a unique position because our sister company is a cable company
and the OTT strategy is a competitive take from what the cable business
is," said
Greenblatt. "Whatever we do in that space, we want to do something that is
not an affront to the cable business or distributors. So we’re trying to craft
something that is a good thing for them as well. So we’re not there yet, but
hopefully in the very near future we’ll have something to talk about. In the
meantime, we’re doing a lot of toe in the water approaches.”

“Anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of viewing is done off the
linear network,” Greenblatt later told Broadcasting & Cable.

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Fox Television Group chief Dana Walden also lauded network
television.

“Our shows become part of the national conversation, they are hitting a nerve.
You can’t have that elsewhere, particularly on OTT,” stated
Walden.

Walden recognized that the broadcast TV space has been
particularly competitive in recent years.

It “has not been the flavor of the month, and for good reason,” Walden said,
considering the rise of “shiny new services that wowed you and cable networks
that won your attention with fantastic shows that would never have survived on
broadcast.”

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Writer and executive producer David E. Kelley, known for
numerous network dramas, made waves by moving over to Amazon and stating he
wouldn’t return to broadcast.

With Amazon television shows, "you're trusting that your audience is going
to sit down and maybe watch the whole series in a week. You don’t have to
remind them what they saw an hour and a half ago. You can be more efficient in
your storytelling and you can just go deeper,” Kelley said.

“We have some pretty deep and dark character arcs within [upcoming show “Goliath”]
that really require a lot of patience with the audience, patience that I'm not
sure a broadcast regime is going to give you,” Kelley added.

YouTube original content head Susanne Daniels, who previously
worked as a programming executive at MTV, touted streaming too.

“We reach over a billion people every single month, including more
18-to-49-year-olds on mobile alone than any broadcast or cable network I’ve
ever worked for. This platform has more power to reach an audience and be more
influential than traditional television,” Daniels said.

FX Networks CEO John Landgraf revealed research
demonstrating a major increase in OTT distribution, and projected the creation
and release of approximately 500 original shows across broadcast, premium,
basic cable and streaming for 2016.

"This is simply too much television. My sense is that
2015 or 2016 will represent peak TV in America, and that we’ll begin to see
declines coming the year after that and beyond,” said
Landgraf.

When it comes to broadcast and OTT, this season's TCA seems to indicate that the battle for viewers has never been more intense.